The Expressed Empathy of Psychiatric Nursing Staff

Authors

  • Ruth Gallop
  • W.J. Lancee
  • Paul Garfinkel

Abstract

The acquisition of effective interpersonal skills is assumed to be inherent in the practice of professional nursing. All curricula provide courses in communication theory. Nursing theorists such as King (1981) stress the need for determining goals for care with the client. Benner (1984), describes one of the steps in the healing relationship as "finding an acceptable interpretation or understanding of the illness, pain, fear, anxiety, or other stressful emotion" (p.49). Pioneers in psychiatric nursing have all written of the necessity of paying attention to the spoken and unspoken messages of the patient (Orlando, 1961; Peplau, 1952; Tudor, 1952). In addition, nurses have emphasized the role of empathy, "the ability to know or understand the experience of another" (Bachrach, 1976) as a critical and necessary clinical tool (Brunt, 1985; Forsyth, 1979; Gagan, 1983; La Monica, Caren, Winder, Hasse & Blanchard, 1976). Thus, it follows that the empathie process is dependent upon the nurse paying attention to the meanings and interpretations patients place upon events in their lives. The subjective meaning or experience of an event may vary widely. The experience of empathy between a nurse and his or her patient is a dynamic process. This process is articulated by the authors in a previous paper (Gallop, Lancée & Garfinkel, 1990). That this process is hard to measure is evident from the enormous body of literature on the definitional, operational and measurement problems associated with the study of empathy. One way of measuring a part of the empathic process is to consider the verbally-expressed empathy of the nurse. Of course, this measures only one aspect of the empathic process and does not consider other aspects such as non-verbal expressions of empathy and the experience of empathy as perceived by the patient. A review of the empirical literature on nurse-patient communication reveals that nurses tend to offer advice and provide information and pay little attention

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Published

1990-04-13

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Section

Articles